


in cold blood

by Singofsolace



Category: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (TV 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Episode Fix-it, F/F, Guns
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-16
Updated: 2020-10-16
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:01:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27047650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Singofsolace/pseuds/Singofsolace
Summary: If Mary Wardwell is going to shoot Zelda Spellman in cold blood, she might as well do it right.My submission to the Madam Spellman Fictober Challenge Week Two prompt: A Change of Heart
Relationships: Zelda Spellman & Mary Wardwell | Madam Satan | Lilith, Zelda Spellman/Mary Wardwell | Madam Satan | Lilith, spellwell
Comments: 18
Kudos: 52
Collections: Madam Spellman Fictober Challenge





	in cold blood

**Author's Note:**

> This fanfic fixes the ending of Part Three, Episode 6: "All of Them Witches."
> 
> Disclaimer: I don't own these characters or this universe. (And neither does Roberto, but that's besides the point).

Zelda waited for Hilda to resurrect with a whiskey in one hand and a cigarette in the other, but neither the alcohol nor the nicotine was doing anything to calm her frayed nerves. She could still feel the gun she’d used to kill her sister in her hands. It had felt cold and unfamiliar even as she expertly raised it to point at Hilda’s heart.

Zelda had always been a good shot.

Even so, she’d always imagined the bite of a bullet to be an impersonal and inhumane way to die, if only because it required very little skill to kill. Poisons required an extensive knowledge of horticulture and medicine; a sword required years of study and constant practice; a bow and arrow required perfect eyesight and impeccable timing.

A gun required nothing but a steady hand.

She hadn’t used the family shotgun in nigh on a century, and that was only because she’d been officially warned by the Greendale Sheriff’s office that threatening teenagers with a shotgun if they didn’t get off her property was all well and good… until she did it to the Mayor’s son. Edward had been so cross with her, he locked the shotgun in one of the morgue’s freezers, with an enchantment that would trap anyone who tried to open it inside the mortuary cabinet themselves.

Zelda took a large sip of her whiskey, desperately searching for that place beyond tipsy where everything was fine and nothing hurt.

If Hilda were here, she would fret about Zelda’s blood pressure. If Hilda were here, she’d gently coax the bad habits out of her hands and lead her off to bed. If Hilda were here, she’d know what to do with a house full of hedge witches and a war on the horizon.

If she were here. But she wasn’t. She was six feet deep in the Cain Pit, having a kip.

Zelda took a long drag of her cigarette, inhaling the smoke deep into her lungs, holding it there for just a moment too long, letting it swirl inside her, before exhaling slowly in a long, gray cloud. This would usually relax her—settle the voices in her head and the shaking in her hands—but it was doing no such thing. Her mind kept drifting back to Hilda—to the way her voice sounded on the phone when she told her to bring the gun.

_“Ze-elda. Help me, please.”_

_The hiccup on her name nearly made Zelda come undone. “Sister, where are you?”_

_“He’s dead.” Hilda’s voice got exceptionally higher as she repeated, “He’s dead, and I killed him.”_

_“Who? What are you talking about?” Zelda couldn’t think of a time when her sister sounded so scared, and they’d soldiered through countless wars, epidemics, and heartbreaks together._

_“Come to Dr. Cee’s. And please, bring a gun.”_

Zelda wasn’t sure what she expected to find when she entered the shop, but it certainly wasn’t her sister transformed into a spider woman. Through centuries of slayings, Zelda had never used a gun to do the deed. The mess would be considerable, especially if she used her father’s most archaic gun, and the magic of the Cain Pit required the body to be mostly intact.

Before Hilda had moved to London, she’d killed her sister at least once or twice every decade or two (or three, when she was feeling blasphemously charitable). In the early years, it hardly took Hilda any time at all to resurrect, and she would come up laughing, sometimes, playing with the worms and giving them all names, just to irritate Zelda by showing her how ineffective the Cain Pit as a mode of punishment had become.

Zelda was always sure to make the death quick—she wasn’t a monster, after all—and thus it had become more of a game than anything else. A way to exert her power over the only person in her life that she could control—her little sister—and she suspected Hilda knew this.

Hilda had told her on numerous occasions that she was the most wretched sister there ever was, but it was no secret that Zelda was frequently belittled, ignored, and abused by their father—and not only by him. Zelda was trying to carve a place for herself in a community that was often hostile to strong, intelligent, and talented women. Hilda often wondered why she even bothered, year after year, to be taken seriously, when it was clear there would never be a worthy position for her in the Church of Night. Hilda knew all of that anger and resentment and pain built up inside her sister, until finally it would pour over, and she would take a hammer to Hilda’s head.

It didn’t make it right.

Zelda stared at the grandfather clock, wishing the pendulum would move faster. She stared and stared, but no, the seconds ticked at a reliable and measured pace, even as minutes faded into hours.

Finally, there was a loud knock at the door. Zelda didn’t pause a moment to ask herself _why_ Hilda would knock when the door was unlocked; she was too relieved to know that her idea had worked.

“Oh, at last,” Zelda said, rushing towards the door. “Hilda.”

But when she opened it, it wasn’t Hilda at all, but rather Lilith—who looked markedly different than she had only a few hours before, when Zelda had refused her sanctuary.

“Witches. All of them. Witches,” Lilith said, but it was in a strange, breathy tone—one she’d never heard Lilith use before.

“Lilith?” Zelda asked, but even as she said the name, she knew this couldn’t be her.

The woman—the imposter—drew a pistol out of her pocket. Zelda hardly reacted, wondering if this was some sort of joke or apparition. As the gun was leveled at her, Zelda’s mind raced to make sense of what she was seeing. The woman clearly didn’t know what she was doing, as the gun wasn’t level, and was instead pointed slightly downward, towards her stomach, rather than at her chest or head, which would be more likely to kill her quickly.

It had been a long time since Zelda Spellman had looked down the barrel of a gun. One of the Von Kunkle’s had threatened her with a buckshot, once upon a time, when she was visiting Dezmelda in Moon Valley, but she’d been able to charm herself out of that situation easily enough.

“This is for Adam,” the woman said, trying to keep the gun steady in her shaking hands.

It was then that Zelda snapped out of her reverie, waving a hand to freeze the woman in place.

“Who are you? What do you want?” Zelda said, stepping forward.

The woman was still able to speak, despite her body being frozen in place. “Mary Wardwell. My fiancé is dead because of you.”

Zelda furrowed her brow. “That’s simply not true. I’ve never even met you—the real you—or your fiancé.”

Mary sputtered. “What do you mean the ‘real’ me? Have you put me under one of your spells? A Priest told me you and your family are witches— _Satanic_ witches!”

“What priest?” Zelda demanded, now certain she could guess who was to blame for this vigilante at her door. “What was his name?”

Mary’s mouth opened and closed. “I didn’t get his name.”

Zelda sighed. Were all mortals this quick to trust a stranger in a habit? “Did he have a British accent? Was he clean-shaven, with dark hair?”

Mary’s eyes widened. “Yes!”

Zelda’s heart leapt into her throat. “I’m sorry to tell you, but that was no priest, Miss Wardwell.”

“You’re lying! That's what witches do; they lie!”

She could feel Mary fighting against the spell that kept her immobile. Zelda’s strength was weak to start with—ever since the Dark Lord had been captured, and then escaped, she’d felt her powers draining away. But she could manage a moment or two more—enough time to perform the equivalent of a mortal Hail-Mary pass.

“I’m not. It was my ex-husband, disguised as a priest, who sent you here, along with the devil himself. They are one and the same,” Zelda explained, calmer than she felt. Her grip on the spell was loosening even as she spoke. “Both of them would stop at nothing to punish me for what I’ve done. Your presence here only confirms that I’m a wanted woman. Now, I’m going to end the spell. You’ll be free to move—free to do whatever you want. But, if you choose to kill me, please know that it will be my innocent niece and nephew who will come running when they hear the gunshot. They will hold me as I slowly bleed to death. Do you think you could bear the weight of that on your conscience—on your very soul?" 

With that, Zelda waved her hand, releasing the spell. Not wasting a moment, she stepped forward, closing the last bit of distance between them, and guided the gun to her left breast, where Mary would have a point-blank shot to her heart.

“I’m not one to beg, Miss Wardwell, but if I might make a request: Make it quick, will you? Before, you were aiming at my stomach; a stomach wound is excruciatingly painful, and takes such an awfully long time to die.” Zelda adjusted Mary’s grip, so that she was holding the gun properly. “And here, your hand should go like this.”

Zelda pressed her chest into the barrel of the gun, so that there would be no missing the target. Mary seemed to have lost some of her bravado; her hands were shaking as she held the gun to Zelda’s chest.

“I can hold it steady for you, if you like?” said Zelda, delivering on her promise. It was strangely intimate, to help a stranger level a shot into her heart. The steel was cold and hard against her breast.

Zelda briefly wondered if this was how Hilda felt when she shot her in the bookstore, but that was an unwelcome, intrusive thought, and immediately tucked it away into the furthest reaches of her mind.

Mary met her gaze, clearly petrified by this development. It was one thing to shoot a woman in cold blood for _revenge_ ; it was entirely another to be told that that revenge had no basis in reality, and to have the same woman offer herself up and seemingly _insist_ on being shot.

Time stood still. Neither woman moved until Mary pressed the gun deeper into Zelda’s chest, forcing her to take a step back.

“I won’t run,” Zelda said slowly, soothingly, as if she were teaching a child how to read. “If you feel I deserve to die because a nameless priest told you I was a witch, and that witches deserve to be shot, well, then... get on with it.”

Mary’s face contorted in pain, but she didn’t lower the gun. “I don’t know what you deserve. I don’t know what’s going on. All I know is that I’ve been having terrible nightmares, my fiancé is dead, and I suspect you or your family had something to do with it.”

Zelda nodded. “You’re scared. I understand. But, if I may… killing someone won’t make you feel better. Trust me.”

Mary sucked in a shuddering breath, as if this sentence had finally given her permission to breathe. Slowly, she lowered the gun, letting it slip through Zelda’s fingers where she’d been bracing it against her chest.

“I’m sorry. I don’t… I don’t know what’s happening to me. I don’t know who I am, or what… what I’m supposed to be doing. All I know is that I don’t want to feel like this anymore—like I’m coming apart at the seams and I have no idea why.”

Zelda breathed a sigh of relief, now that she was no longer being held at gun point. “Well, if you’d like to come in, I’ll put the kettle on, and we can discuss whatever it is that’s troubling you. I suspect it has something to do with Lilith—but that’s a rather long conversation, I’m afraid.”

Mary nodded, though her expression was the picture of disbelief. “Are you really going to let me in after I tried to shoot you?”

Zelda scoffed before turning on her heel and heading towards the kitchen. “Please. I’m currently housing several violent, powerful women who could kill me without lifting a finger. I think I can handle one mortal with a gun.”

Against her better judgment, Mary Wardwell followed Zelda into the kitchen. While she had had plenty of strange things happen to her since she’d awoken from her stupor, she had to admit, Zelda Spellman holding the gun steady as she aimed it at her heart had to be the most absurd thing yet. But there was something inside of Mary telling her to trust this woman, and so, she took a seat at the Spellman’s kitchen table and watched Zelda bustle about the room as she waited for the tea to boil.

**Author's Note:**

> There we have it! Please let me know what you think of this canon divergence.


End file.
